Armed citizen deniers claim that ordinary Americans don’t have the skills or training to respond to an active shooter with guns. When one such individual recently took down the Minnesota mall slasher, Bloomberg.com denied his “good guy with a gun” status because he was too good.
Jason Falconer is a former police chief, a gun range owner, an NRA-certified instructor and a competitive shooter. In Bloomberg’s view, that disqualifies him from “good guy with a gun” status: “By all accounts, Falconer is a good guy and his heroics saved lives. What made him effective, however is that he’s an expert guy.”
NRA has trained more than 50,000 instructors, and sanctions more than 11,000 shooting matches annually. The United States Practical Shooting Association (USPSA) and the International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPS) claim over 22,000 members each. Armed citizens log about 760,000 defensive gun uses per year (versus 11,000 gun homicides). Yet Bloomberg would disarm all of us (including Falconer) for either being ill-trained, or well-trained, or … you know, just, whatever.
